The Consultants-E is an educational company specializing in distance learning and foreign language study. They do offer on-line courses, many of which are given on the island of EduNation2 in Second Life. I received their course schedule this morning and thought I would pass it on to you if you are interested in learning more about wikis, podcasts, and educating via Second Life.

I've tried now, in two classes (one at an online university, the other at an online high school), to use wikis and collaborative writing as part of my formative assessment. The online university was asynchronous, the highschool was synchronous. Both did not work out very well, but for very different reasons.

I think it was James Paul Gee who coined the phrase 'digital natives', ie, our students are immersed in digital media, they understand it intuitively, and we, as 'digital… Continue

The second (and final day) of the DHCS Colloquium ran from 9 - 1 and followed a slightly different format than the previous day. Three papers were followed by a panel discussion which was then followed by closing remarks and a thirty-minute near-extempore speech summing up the themes of the conference and asking for what to pursue next year. I'll sum up the important bits (at least to me) first, and then will get a bit shouty at the end. Fair warning.

I discovered a beautiful pair of Latin podcasts from Vilniaus Universitetas' Klasikines Filologijos Katedra (School of Classical Philology), songs sung by Classics student, Julija Butkevičiūtė. The songs feature the full lyrics of Catullus 51 and Horace Odes I.11 and are accompanied by piano. Haunting, spare, and pretty, with good pronunciation to boot!… Continue

Announcing the release of version 3.1 of Diogenes, a free program for
reading the databases of Latin and Greek texts published on CD-Rom by
the Packard Humanities Institute and the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae.

The major new feature in this version is that, thanks to the
generosity of the Perseus project, morphological data and dictionaries
for Latin… Continue

In the summer 2007 issue of The Journal of Classics Teaching, Bob Lister (Cambridge) writes an excellent article on the state of IT (or ICT) in Classics at the high school level, comparing technology use now against an initial survey done in the 1990s. From my experience here in the States, it looks like there is parity between the US and the UK; the questions of integrating IT and Classics for blended pedagogy are universal. Well worth the read. While I could not find an electronic copy freely… Continue

I've made a decision. Actually it was Rose Williams who helped me make it. Sometime this fall, yours truly, the eponymous eClassicist himself (and friend to commas), will be going into the contemporary high school Latin classroom. Let it be said that I took a whole lot of German in high school in the 1980s when computers were for programming classes only. I took my Latin in both college and graduate school back when Al Gore was busy inventing the… Continue